Debate on Crown Entities, Public Organisations, and State Enterprises — New Zealand Qualifications Authority

I want members to know just how serious the problems are in the New Zealand Qualification Authority, which is the organisation that we are debating today. It has responsibility for running the qualifications system for young New Zealanders. That means that for 150,000 young New Zealanders every year the question of whether they get a fair go from that qualification system is dependent on the integrity of that organisation’s processes. Some of its processes have integrity; it is able to conduct external exams with a couple of million scripts, and it delivers results quite competently. But I have been very disturbed to find, in recent weeks, that the organisation has almost no intellectual integrity about how it assesses the quality of the way it examines young New Zealanders.

In the Education and Science Committee we had a discussion with Karen Sewell, whose main objective seems to have been to do a quick paint job for Minister Maharey in order to make sure there would be no controversy this year. But the New Zealand Qualifications Authority showed that it has no interest in the technical issues around the soundness of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) examinations. It has no interest in validity and reliability—those things are the currency of educational testing. Not only does the organisation have no interest in those areas but it has no ability to assess whether NCEA examinations are fair to our students.

I asked Karen Sewell one simple question, which was how she could assure parents like me that when a student sits an external exam and does an internal assessment on a related standard—which almost every student does—those assessments have about the same level of difficulty. Well, she could not give me that assurance. Worse than that, she made it clear that she thought it was a stupid question, and that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority has no interest, at all, in whether the standards of internal assessment are vaguely similar to the standards of external assessment.

One of the reasons the authority has no interest in this is that almost any cursory analysis tells us that NCEA is still, in many respects, unfair to our students. I asked her what people she employed who had expertise in assessment. Well, in this vast $50 million budget, she says there are two of those people. I have asked people in New Zealand universities who are assessment experts about that, and they do not recognise any of those people—they say there are none. Professor Hattie, whom the Minister is keen to quote when it suits him—and who has done so incorrectly, in a way that misled Parliament—told me that when he did the analysis on scholarship, which anyone should do in a public examination system, no one in the New Zealand Qualifications Authority knew how to carry out this analysis sufficiently so that he could talk to them about it. He told me that he had never been asked to do, and no one has done, tests of reliability and validity on NCEA levels 1 to 3.

That is a disgrace. It is a scandal that we are running a national qualification and national examination system that has high stakes for thousands of students, and we are served up waffle and pap by the chief executive, who leaned across the desk and said: “You can have confidence.” Well, I would say to Ms Sewell that I do not have confidence, and I am pleased that she is gone. I say to Minister Maharey that the answers to making NCEA work are not political spin; the answers come from hard-headed analysis of the validity and reliability of the exams, and that is not getting done.

We are running national examination systems, without expertise in assessment, and we are not using the tools that tinpot Australian states apply to their examination systems relentlessly and forever. We do not do that, because we are better! The Minister will get up and go on about School Certificate. Who cares about School Certificate? A whole generation of students and parents have passed through the system since then.

I thought the previous speaker might like to take another call, because the issue is an important one. I welcome the fact that the speech was one of the few times I have heard him sustain an argument, rather than just criticise, so it was good to have the chance to listen to it.

I want to go back over the year in respect of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. As a new Minister coming into this portfolio over the last little while, I want to thank, first of all, the board, particularlyCatherine Gibson, who I think worked very hard over the summer period, and Karen Sewell, who came from the Education Review Office. I remember meeting with them and saying that the one thing I wanted for this summer was a good exam season. I think of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority as being a bit like the Reserve Bank: there is no point in having a Reserve Bank if it is not blue chip. We rely on it to set the tone for money in this country. We want the same blue-chip feel in respect of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. It has to be an organisation that teachers, parents, and students can rely on to tell them that the qualifications our young people are getting are top-notch. That is what it has to be.

I know that in politics it is always a great thing to be able to get up and slag off public officials who, of course, cannot answer back because they are required not to. So it is pretty easy to be a bit of a bully-boy and stand up in the Chamber and consistently slag off those people, who have to be polite in return. I say to Mr English that that kind of behaviour just ain’t good. It is the kind of behaviour that should really be reserved for slagging off each other. I am happy if he has a go at me, because then I can have a go at him.

I also say to Mr English that I regard Karen Sewell as being an outstanding public servant. She took up the challenge right through the summer of not only trying to make sure we had a good exam season but also, every time there were issues, getting up and explaining them in public, taking questions, and making sure we were able to move on. Thankfully, there were few problems this summer. We had a system that worked pretty well. During that period, Mr English put out something like 13 or 14 attacks, including one on Ms Sewell’s integrity. But we came through it pretty well, and that is something members should applaud.

I know that right across the education sector people are sick and tired of the kinds of criticisms that took place over the summer, when, as Wyatt Creech said when this policy was introduced under the National Government, this is the kind of policy that deserves bipartisanship. How else do 14, 15, 16, or 17-year-old young New Zealanders apply themselves to their exams, when one of the leading politicians in the country—the previous leader of the National Party—is consistently preferring norm referencing over standards-based assessment and is slagging off the people who run the exam and undermining every aspect of it, without there being any evidence for him to do so?

I see National people in the Chamber just having a quiet wee think—thoughtful people like Maurice Williamson—

💬 Darren Hughes: Reflective.

—reflective people, intelligent people like Katherine Rich. I just say to them that they ought to take Mr English aside and tell him to look at all the clippings from principals and teachers from right across the country who are saying they have had enough of this.

What Mr English did today was, I think, good, because today was an example of his trying to engage with the problem. Let us now look at how, going from a good exam season, we can improve this system. That is what I want to spend my year doing. But I am very grateful and thankful that over this summer all the hard work of last year paid off, that we had a better exam season, and that everybody, other than Warwick Elley and Bill English, agrees the system has improved.

I think that Warwick Elley is an outstanding New Zealander, with an enormous research record. I just happen to think that on this matter he is wrong. His argument was based on looking at one standard within a subject, which is like one question within the exam, and looking at the variability on that standard. He is condemning the whole system, when he should be asking how all the standards added up into the biology exam, for example, and whether we got reasonable variability across the subject. The answer is that, yes, we did and that therefore it is fair to the students. Can we do better? I think we can. We have had only 3 years of this examination system. We can do better yet to get our consistency and fairness right.

But for this year, we did pretty well, and I want to applaud those young New Zealanders who stepped up and did those exams after an internal assessment season that was busy for them, as well. They had more assessments than they have ever had in their lives, but they stepped up and did the exams. They are stretched, because they are able to move towards excellence, and we should remember that the kind of excellence that is built into those exams has never been present in our exams before—never. For example, in the area of mathematics there has never, within the maths exam, been a standard like the standard of excellence that we have now—a standard that seriously stretches the young people who are taking those kinds of exams. This is something we should be applauding amongst our young people. We should be telling them that it was a good thing they did so well this year, instead of sending them message after message that somehow, on the basis of no evidence at all—just because of political expediency and just because Bill English prefers norm referencing—we are going to end up slagging off the exams those young people took.

I think that every parent in this Chamber with young people wanted us—on the back of knowing that this year those exams worked for us—to say “Well done!” to those young people. So I say that to them. I thank them for trying so hard and say to them that they are great young New Zealanders. Now they need to step up into the next stage of their assessment, which may be to level 2 or 3, or on to their further education after that. I thank those people in the New Zealand Qualifications Authority who worked so hard to get us through the exam season this year.

We are not finished by any manner of means. No one has to tell us the problems—we will be the first to recognise them. We do not need Bill English to raise them. We will do that. What we want from Bill English is for him to engage with the issues and tell us how we can work together in a bipartisan way to make the New Zealand Qualifications Authority system a blue-chip system that we can all have total trust in, because that is what we need in this country. I say to people who are involved in this debate that if they do not want to do that, then they should go and do something else. Our young people are far too important to become some kind of football for someone who just wants to take over the leadership of the National Party.

Report noted.

Having had a discussion with the senior Opposition whip, I seek leave that we debate Housing New Zealand Corporation while Mr Maharey is the Minister in the chair.

The CHAIRPERSON (Ann Hartley): Leave is sought to do that. Is there any objection? There is not.

Housing New Zealand Corporation